Real people have a tendency to hurt. Like shards of ice we shatter as easily as we cut, and when you’re young and you’re wounded you’d rather be safe than be broken. After all, you’ve been wrecked before, all in pieces and because of people that you loved. You are thirteen: you seek to gather the fragments, patch them together, and find a place where people can’t hurt you anymore.

She leaves you: she rightly decides she cannot love that which she cannot be with, cannot grow with, and cannot speak to but secretly and at intervals. She has been pouring her love and her life into a void, looking at you with pleading eyes, but you cannot come to her. She must either move on, or live in paradox: she decides to move on.

The people you maligned as fools pass before you. Who was the fool after all? You see the people who loved you, and they still love you, and you smile a wicked smile and hold them to you, for you love them madly.